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“... that the sketches had a ‘force of sensation’, but found the finished oils a ‘bore’. John Berger took the opposite view, that the completed works were rich in brilliant light effects, but the sketches were weakened by vague Romanticism. More recent left-wing critiques, especially since ...”

“... the lover (who has, significantly, no credit on the title page). Spencer’s letters to and from John Tasker, an Australian with whom he was involved between 1957 and 1959, when they were both in their mid-twenties, are not, as love letters go, especially interesting. There are routine endearments, doubts, quarrels, expressions of physical desire and gossip ...”

“... 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him. He seems to have been immune to such essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope ...”

“... turns out to be a guilty one. The cucurbits are victims of repression. Those of us who, before we took up this book, hadn’t thought the pumpkin and its unhappy kind were ridiculous, or erotic, or even taboo, had simply failed to look them in the face – we were operating the well-known taboo on taboo subjects. Ralf Norrman and Jon Haarberg spend almost ...”

“... hollow sound whooshed forth, making monkeys of us all. And do you think the boy on the gourd took any notice of us? Naw, he was too full of himself to be another’s. The end result is eponymous, like they say. If no name clings to the door’s outside you are all free to pick up your things at the cashier’s desk and mosey outward, I suppose, if that ...”

“... sun, and some, with how the planets were aligned, but later, when the river froze for miles, we took our first crazed steps into an air we’d never breathed till then, our strange companions smiling, as we pitched our tents and stalls, happy to see the flags and bunting, as if yellow was a thing they’d never seen before – and red, and green – as ...”

“... is! Look how damp! His hair is glued across his temples. Bring the lamp! When this was done, she took him in her lap. The night was dark and you could hear the crack of shots outside where they were killing more. – It’s time, we said, to bury him. From a drawer in a walnut wardrobe, we took a linen sheet. She moved his ...”

“... entwined.           Our neighbour                           John who spends his free time diving plumbing the sea for evidence and spilt cargoes         who has burrowed in the mud to touch the mystery of something absolute         can tell you how                         out in the ...”

“... liked Stone’s technicolour vision of the tormented painter and gave the go-ahead.’ Stone took as his title what Jack had provisionally called his unwritten autobiography, Sailor on Horseback. It indicated congeniality; and Stone was predisposed to take Jack very much on his own rollicking terms. There was, if the biographer wanted it, a vast store of ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”

“... mention this letter but turns in two other directions, towards the Peterloo Massacre which took place after a crowd assembled to demand parliamentary reform and the abolition of the Corn Laws, and, with a glance at an early poem, towards Hunt’s journalism. Peterloo gives him an ode written in its ‘aftermath’ and ‘against a backdrop of real ...”

“... mad. I say, we will have no more marriages: Narrowest of loopholes, love is not the martyry we took it for in sleepless adolescence, cobalt blue as portage, windows feathered through the night with tufts of frost. Had we but known that we so loved the cold as children there would be no marriages, only the little death of going out at dewfall, shivers ...”

“... bar and there he was, the Old Man, larger than life, his eye like a raptor’s, raw and quick, who took Bacon that day in Spain, who took Soutine and Schiele and Rouault, three who knocked me flat before I could think, before I knew a thing, leaving me no way back, and took John Keats ...”

“... at the University of California at Irvine while getting his PhD in American literature. He then took a job at a worthy but less prestigious school – Storrs University in Connecticut, where he now teaches English. While earning his degree and his bread in the classroom, Bradfield has, over the last ten years, put together an impressive corpus of fiction ...”